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Thursday, October 24, 2013

ake sales have long been a go-to solution for organizations looking to make money. More recently, they've also provided a platform for protest — and not the most savory kind.
The University of Texas at Austin’s Young Conservatives of Texas group last month hosted an “Affirmative Action Bake Sale” where they charged customers prices based on their race. It was part of a larger effort to clarify their position regarding the controversial Fisher v. University of Texas case, which is now being debated at the U.S. Supreme Court level, concerning affirmative action admissions policy of the university's Austin campus.
The bake sale, held on September 25, was more an act of protest than a money-making move by the conservative student organization. UT officials were not impressed; in a statement issued two days after the sale, the university's Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement, Gregory Vincent, said not only was the action inflammatory and demeaning, but it set the stage for further exclusion and disrespect within the student, faculty and staff communities.
- See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/latest-scandal-ut-austin-bake-sale-attacks-race?fb_action_ids=10202167897137845&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%2210202167897137845%22%3A613537205356820%7D&action_type_map=%7B%2210202167897137845%22%3A%22og.likes%22%7D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D#sthash.MBWQyUxD.dpuf

Bake sales have long been a go-to solution for organizations looking to make money. More recently, they've also provided a platform for protest — and not the most savory kind.
The University of Texas at Austin’s Young Conservatives of Texas group last month hosted an “Affirmative Action Bake Sale” where they charged customers prices based on their race. It was part of a larger effort to clarify their position regarding the controversial Fisher v. University of Texas case, which is now being debated at the U.S. Supreme Court level, concerning affirmative action admissions policy of the university's Austin campus.
The bake sale, held on September 25, was more an act of protest than a money-making move by the conservative student organization. UT officials were not impressed; in a statement issued two days after the sale, the university's Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement, Gregory Vincent, said not only was the action inflammatory and demeaning, but it set the stage for further exclusion and disrespect within the student, faculty and staff communities.
“The choice of a tiered pricing structure creates the misperception that some students either do not belong at the university or do not deserve to have access to our institution—or worse, that they belong or deserve only to a certain degree,” Vincent said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Representatives for Young Conservatives of Texas-UT did not respond to multiple attempts for comment, but in an interview with college- and fraternity-centered site “Total Frat Move,” YCT Chairman and UT student Lorenzo Garcia defended the bake sale saying actions like these will spark a necessary political debate.
“If we didn’t do something like this, a lot of students wouldn’t really pay attention to the issue. Whether it’s the affirmative action bake sale or other things that are pretty controversial but prove a point, and you know, stick it to the liberals pretty much,” Garcia wrote. “With college kids, you have to do something like this to get their attention.”
“Affirmative Action Bake Sales” are not a new occurrence. The University of California at Berkeley experienced a similar incident in 2011 in protest to an upcoming Senate bill that would allow public universities in California to adopt affirmative action policies.
In 2008, Young Conservatives of Texas at Texas A&M University hosted their version of the bake sale to protest against the upcoming employment of James Anderson, who would assume the post of Vice President of Institutional Assessment and Diversity for the university.
In their statement to the media, Rebecca Falkowski, current issues director for YCT at Texas A&M, said, “We hope our affirmative action bake sale and pledge drive will show the students of Texas A&M University the fallacies of many of the so- called ‘diversity’ initiatives being pursued by Texas A&M and other universities across the country.”
Some university officials, like Southern Methodist University in Texas, have stepped in and shut down potential bake sales before they even got started.
But UT biology senior Nick Mitchell doesn’t agree that it is the place of universities to stifle free speech by preventing the bake sale.
“It’s not the university’s job to stop speech, it’s the student community’s job to pressure racists into stopping,” Mitchell said. “Race is a complicated issue, and the YCT dumbed down the entire complex issue of affirmative action into something so simple and silly that I really don’t think anyone, even those who agree, could take them seriously.”
When Mitchell himself passed by the bake sale, he saw most people just laughing off the protesters. “I think the worst thing that can happen as a protestor is to have people laugh at you, and that’s the biggest response I saw,” he said.

- See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/latest-scandal-ut-austin-bake-sale-attacks-race?fb_action_ids=10202167897137845&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%2210202167897137845%22%3A613537205356820%7D&action_type_map=%7B%2210202167897137845%22%3A%22og.likes%22%7D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D#sthash.MBWQyUxD.dpuf

As a board member of FairTest, I'm so glad that we're doing this. If you have a Facebook account, please consider liking FairTest at https://www.facebook.com/FairTest. So glad to see this happening. Angela

By Valerie Strauss,
Updated: October 22 at 11:07 am

More than 120 authors and illustrators of books for children —
including Maya Angelou, Judy Blume and Jane Yolen — urged President
Obama in a letter sent Tuesday to curb policies that promote excessive
standardized testing and said they are “alarmed” about the impact “on
children’s love reading and literature.”
The letter, delivered to the White House, was organized by The National Center for Fair & Open Testing, known as FairTest, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending the misuse of standardized tests. It says in part:

We are alarmed at the negative impact of excessive school
testing mandates, including your administration’s own initiatives, on
children’s love of reading and literature. Recent policy changes by your
Administration have not lowered the stakes. On the contrary,
requirements to evaluate teachers on student test scores impose more
standardized exams and crowd out exploration.

Angelou is noteworthy on this list not only because of her position
in the literary world but because she has been a big public supporter of
Obama. Other signers include Jules Feiffer, Donald Crews, Alma Flor
Ada, and National Book Award winners Kathryn Erskine and Phillip Hoose.

The mention of Obama’s education initiatives is in part a reference
to Obama’s main ed program called Race to the Top. Critics say it has
extended the high-stakes testing mandates on public schools that started
during the No Child Left Behind era of former president George W. Bush
by insisting that student test scores be used to judge teachers through ”value-added” methods that many experts say are unreliable and invalid.
Here’s the text of the letter:

President Barack Obama
The White House
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Obama,
We the undersigned children’s book authors and illustrators write to
express our concern for our readers, their parents and teachers. We are
alarmed at the negative impact of excessive school testing mandates,
including your Administration’s own initiatives, on children’s love of
reading and literature. Recent policy changes by your Administration
have not lowered the stakes. On the contrary, requirements to evaluate
teachers based on student test scores impose more standardized exams and
crowd out exploration.
We call on you to support authentic performance assessments, not
simply computerized versions of multiple-choice exams. We also urge you
to reverse the narrowing of curriculum that has resulted from a fixation
on high-stakes testing.
Our public school students spend far too much time preparing for
reading tests and too little time curling up with books that fire their
imaginations. As Michael Morpurgo, author of the Tony Award Winner War Horse, put it, “It’s not about testing and reading schemes, but about loving stories and passing on that passion to our children.”
Teachers, parents and students agree with British author Philip
Pullman who said, “We are creating a generation that hates reading and
feels nothing but hostility for literature.” Students spend time on test
practice instead of perusing books. Too many schools devote their
library budgets to test-prep materials, depriving students of access to
real literature. Without this access, children also lack exposure to our
country’s rich cultural range.
This year has seen a growing national wave of protest against testing
overuse and abuse. As the authors and illustrators of books for
children, we feel a special responsibility to advocate for change. We
offer our full support for a national campaign to change the way we
assess learning so that schools nurture creativity, exploration, and a
love of literature from the first day of school through high school
graduation.

In 2002, only 94 books
were written about, and 48 books written by, Latinas/os:
That number has not improved.

For instance, 2012
statistics reveal that out of a total of 5,000 children’s books published
that year, 54 of them were written about, and only 59 were written by,
Latinas/os.

In 2011, just over 3% of
3,400 books reviewed were written by or about Latinos.

Only 18% of Latino fourth
graders were proficient in reading; meanwhile, 44% of their white peers
were classified as being proficient in reading.

In Texas alone, by the year
2050, another study shows, public schools will serve 9 million students,
from the 5 million at present—of these, 6 million will be of Hispanic
origin.

Despite flash flood warnings, an
unusual spate of rain and high winds in a drought-devastated Central Texas,
about 45 dedicated community activists, librarians, historians, archivists,
scholars, and local leaders gathered in Austin on September 20, 2013, to
address the significance of these figures. The consensus was a mixture of
concern, outrage, and a commitment to take action.

The timely publication of a Young
Adult novel, Noldo and His Magical Scooter at the Battle of the Alamo and
a visit by its author, Armando Rendón, sparked the event. Rendón is founder and
editor of “Somos en Escrito Magazine”.

The entire experience was
otherworldly in that Rendón’s visit coincided in space and time with a
conversation that has been building in the Austin community regarding the
systemic unavailability of books that are not only written by, but that also
have content that is relevant to the history and experiences of Chicana/os and
Latina/os. Merging these agendas found expression in this historic gathering of
local leaders that further sought direction from one of our own, Oralia Garza
de Cortés, who is a leading voice for children’s literature and library and
literacy services for Latino children and families at local, state, and
national levels.

A teacher
speaks at MACC reading/forum

This was truly a shared community effort that
involved the following co-sponsors: the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American
Cultural Center (also referred to as “the MACC”), Austin Parks and Recreation,
Las Comadres and Friends National Latino Book, Teresa Lozano Long Institute of
Latin American Studies; Benson Latin American Collection, the Center for Mexican American Studies and the Texas
Center for Education Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, the
National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project, Modesta and José
Treviño, and El Corazón De Tejas, the Central Texas Chapter of REFORMA, an affiliate
of the American Library Association. REFORMA is a national association to
promote library and information services for Latinos and the Spanish
speaking.

Serving as moderator, Dr. Angela
Valenzuela from the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Center for Education
Policy, opened the event with general commentary on how the dearth of
children’s books with content that is important to Latino/as intersects so
powerfully with other advocacy areas that are also germane to the needs and
experiences of our communities, including literacy, our literary heritage,
intellectual traditions, archives, cultural preservation, and the arts. She
urged the audience to consider ways that they can become advocates.

Through his presentation, Rendón
brilliantly and magically transported his eager audience to Noldo’s barrio
in San Antonio, Texas’s West Side. The novel, set in the 1950’s, finds
Noldo playing outdoors and witnessing sudden cloudbursts, lightning, and
thunder that drenches the rutted street that is his playscape (caliche
barrio). What follows next is Noldo’s own time travel story that transports
him to 1836 to the Misión San Antonio de Valero, known today as “El
Alamo,” where he befriends a young person his own age on the eve of this
historic battle.

After reading several passages
from his novel, Rendón shared with us his own evolution as an
editor-turned-children’s book writer. He mentioned how he came to realize
through his research, looking through library catalogues, and talking to people
around the country just how dire the situation is with regard to Latina/o
children’s books. “There isn’t much available for young adults—certainly
Chicanos and Latinos. And certainly not adventure stories, something that kids
might read and see themselves in there, their story. And I think that’s
what you’re talking about, that when young people read a book, they’re reading
about themselves. When they pick up Noldo, I hope that young people will
realize that this is their story and not just mine.”

He mused about Noldo’s time
travel and how his plans are to take him to the Mexican Revolution of 1910
where Noldo provides a personal, eye-witness account of the battle at Juárez
from the safety of El Paso.

Oralia
Garza de Cortés

Oralia Garza de Cortés’ stirring
presentation addressed a range of issues associated with the systemic lack of
access to Latina/o children's literature and how best to advocate. She noted
that “Publishers must bear the brunt of this responsibility, although they’re
not the sole culprits. The publishing industry is like a giant ship in that it
has many moving parts. There are literary agents, editors, reviewers,
selectors, librarians, book sellers, and book buyers,” she asserted. “Everyone
plays a critical role in promoting, reviewing, and purchasing these books that
have been vetted by a combined team of professional librarians to select the
best of the best. Without the published books, there can be no selection,” she
said.

Oralia shared the shocking news that at this year’s
Pura Belpré Award—one of three major awards given to Latino/a children’s book
authors—the selection committee did not select books for special honors. “It
was stunning to be in a room of 5,000 librarians and it’s like the Academy
Awards when you’re in this room,” she said. “When they read the statement
that said ‘no honor books for writers,’ there were gasps in the room.”

She explained how this rare occurrence was the
result of not having enough books to select from and how this speaks volumes
about the lack of literature from which to select, as well as
one committee’s insistence on quality. She further situated this crisis in
the context of a 50 million and growing school-age, Latino population, noting
that the limited number of published books—less than 200—is a travesty. “Que
verguenza!” she exclaimed.

What followed was a lively conversation on how to
begin to change this with the multiple and varied strategies that can serve as
guideposts for what many of us in Austin believe is an idea whose time has
come.

Archivist, scholar, and activist Martha Cotera
launched the conversation with the following observation: “I think one of the
issues is that as a community, we fail to serve on city boards and commissions.
And I think that the local REFORMA chapter should definitely ensure that
there’s always a member on the library commission. I did my time. I’m a founder
of REFORMA National and I did eight years on the Austin Public Library Commission.
. In those eight years,we did extensive evaluations and surveys on service to
Hispanics. There is much service one can do. So if you are not serving on
a board or commission, you cannot blame anybody for bad service.”

Local labor leader and library activist, Teresa
Perez-Wiseley, agreed that advocacy in small and large ways is a must. She
shared that it should not be a difficult proposition getting these books into
our children’s schools, but it is. Teresa suggested to the audience that to
override the bureaucratic hurdles it is often best to simply purchase and
donate Latina/o children’s books to our local school libraries.

An audience member raised an issue mentioned by
Garza de Cortés that many of the children’s books for Latina/os that she came
across actually had damaging content. She asked whether there is any
organization that sends out a list that says, “Do not buy this because this is
not a culturally sensitive book?” None appears to exist.

Another person situated this conversation in the
context of the Austin Independent School District’s dual language programs
saying, “All of our teachers are complaining that they still cannot find enough
Spanish literature for our children.” She asked for direction not on just how
to get more books in their hands, but ones with appropriate, “correctly
translated” content. She underscored how a demand exists. “We just need to know
how to get the books. Just as Teresa said, they’re looking at South America.
They’re trying to get the books to the kids, but it’s hard.”

Some discussion centered on how to become a
Latina/o children’s book writer. Both Rendón and Garza de Cortés referred to
the important, if complex, negotiation of two language systems that capture
well the discourses, identities, and histories of our communities but also work
politically to elevate us in the eyes of publishers beyond our more typical
designation as “regional minorities” for a “regional market.” This is an
antiquated mentality that needs to get challenged.

Other issues that surfaced included a lack of
Latina/o librarians or other committed individuals responsible for insuring
that our library collections are sufficient, that is, the pipeline for careers
in librarianship is fragile and should be strengthened.

Aside from Cotera’s and Perez-Wiseley’s
commentaries on assuming leadership positions locally and advocating
singlehandedly, respectively, both Texas historian Dr. Emilio Zamora and Martha
Cotera suggested workshops or a Saturday school for our community that could be
held at the MACC. It could be a site for professional development workshops, as
well as organized events around different kinds of writing like history or
poetry that brings writers and community to spaces like these to address larger
issues related to writing and publishing.

The evening ended with a reception and book-signing
event with multiple copies of Noldo finding their way into eager hands.
The reception was rife with hope and expectation that we would reconvene soon
to begin contemplating artist workshops, a Saturday school for Latina/o
children, and a targeted strategy involving the City of Austin and Austin
Public Libraries in order to begin to meet the demand that exists.

We conclude with Rendón’s apt commentary on the
task that lies before us: “Writing for children is a political act. More people
realize that in our community. Look at the powerful people in this room. It’s
amazing. I feel like a kid, you know, imagining how we can get this movement
growing into something even bigger.”

We feel like kids, too, Armando. You and Noldo
are helping us to grasp our need to travel to the past in hopes for a brighter
future. Gracias!

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., a nationally and
internationally renowned scholar and professor in Educational Administration,
chairs the Education Policy and Planning Program at the University of Texas at
Austin and serves as the Department's Graduate Adviser. She also directs the
Texas Center for Education Policy at UT.She is author of the groundbreaking book, "Subtractive Schooling :
U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring," published by State
University of New York, 1999.

Clarissa Riojas, graduating this year from UT Austin with a B.A. in
English Literature, Mexican American Studies, and a certification in Latino
Education, Language, and Literacy under the Bridging Disciplines Program, is an
intern with Dr. Valenzuela in the Texas Center for Education Policy.

Monday, October 14, 2013

Here is an important article on the history of Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio http://www.lared-latina.com/cops.htm It is very much about the potential power that poor, oppressed folks have to turn around their circumstances.
This is a very important and rich history without which things would
really have turned out a lot differently in San Antonio and beyond had COPS never entered the
picture.

This is a painful and indeed shameful story of the ways in which the poor were directly victimized by city leaders in San Antonio.

The world is fortunate to have benefited from the extraordinary community activist leadership of Ernesto Cortes and Oralia Garza de Cortes who have dedicated their lives to helping the poor. I remain deeply inspired and encouraged by all
that they have done. May God continue to bless this work greatly.

-Angela

The San Antonio COPS Revolution
By Roberto Vazquez,
LaRed Latina News Network
Posted on March 14, 2005, Printed on March 14, 2005
In her San Antonio Express-News column of 6/6/04, Jan Jarboe Russel,
describes very graphically the 1974 confrontation of
COPS Representatives and then Mayor Charles Becker.
"On a muggy Thursday night in August 1974, about 500 members of
Communities Organized for Public Service converged in the City Council
chamber and demanded to be heard.
Now Father Albert Benavides and Beatrice Gallego stood at the microphone
and insisted (Mayor) Charles Becker and the City Council hear them out. I
will never forget the anger etched like granite on Benavides' face. The
priest stood there, shaking his fists high in the air, looking like the
prophet Jeremiah."
What was not known back then was that Father Benavides, along with the
other COPS representatives had been quietly organizing, and painstakingly
researching the issues for a whole year before they decided to approach
city officials. It turned out that COPS representatives were much better
informed, and more knowledgeable about San Antonio socio-economic and
political issues then were the Mayor, Councilmen, and City Manager.
Even that famous 1974, confrontation between COPS and Charles Becker/City
Council, was carefully choreographed and orchestrated beforehand by COPS.
By the time COPS representatives decided to approach San Antonio city
officials, they already had rehearsed political strategies, tactics, along
with contingency plans to cover almost any conceivable scenario or counter
action posed by the opposition.
In other words, the city government establishment had no chance against
COPS. However, city officials did not know that. They were caught totally
by surprise.
Through their intensive research, COPS members found out that city
officials had for decades been diverting city funds from the inner city to
newly developed subdivisions on the North Side. In effect city officials
were stealing from the poor West and South side neighborhoods to provide
funds for developers in the affluent North Side suburbs.
In a 1978 article, Moises Sandoval, a Alicia Patterson Foundation award
winner, notes, "Officials whom they had held in awe had for years
"re-programmed" to the suburbs bond monies earmarked for inner city
projects such as critically needed storm sewers. Meanwhile, persons were
drowning when heavy rains flooded low-lying barrios. Even as COPS was
beginning to fasten an eagle eye on the City Council's activities, the
city voted to buy a golf course from a developer with federal Community
Development Act funds which were supposed to be spent for the improvement
of poor neighborhoods. (COPS action led to a veto of the purchase of
federal authorities.) Developers were receiving millions of taxpayers'
money in subsidies for water main installations in subdivisions both
inside and outside the city limits while central city neighborhoods had to
make do with two-inch mains which made washing dishes and taking a shower
activities that could not go on at the same time in one house."
Jan Jarboe clearly describes this issue in her 6/6/04 Express-News column
about the legendary confrontation of COPS and Mayor Charles Becker.
"Father Albert Benavides spoke directly to (Mayor) Charles Becker and
told him that even though many drainage projects for the West Side had
been authorized by the city in bond issues, they never were built.
Becker turned to City Manager Sam Granata and asked if the priest was
telling the truth. Granata indicated that it was true. Then Becker asked
how long the drainage projects for the West Side had been planned. "About
40 years," Granata responded."
Forty years is a long time to wait for services. It's possible that if
COPS had not intervened then, the West Side might still be waiting for the
drainage projects today.

"I can say unequivocally, COPS has fundamentally altered the moral tone
and the political and physical face of San Antonio."
These words ring true today as they did back then. Since 1973, through the
present, COPS/Metro Alliance, have managed to dramatically transform and
diversify electoral politics in San Antonio, and Bexar County. This
community organization has also managed to generate over one billion
dollars in city/county, state, and federal public funds for capital and
infrastructure improvements for the West and South sides of San Antonio.
These projects included a community college, drainage systems, new housing
and housing rehabilitation, public parks, health clinics, public libraries
and a host of other related urban improvements.
One may wonder how COPS became so effective in social and political
engineering in San Antonio. Some say it's because they are a faith-based
organization inspired by God, the scriptures, the Prophets and the Holy
Spirit. I personally think there may be some truth to this notion.
However, I believe the main reason COPS has been so successful is because
they are a grass-roots organization that works to build long term
relationships among members based on family values, religious and social
traditions, as well as good old "All American" Democratic ideals and
values.
Mark Warren, in "Connecting People to Politics," quotes Reverend Mike
Haney as saying "COPS is a way of implementing the gospel's call to
justice that it imposes on us. This happens in a couple of ways: dealing
with issues themselves; and COPS calls us to work as a collective, to find
strength in community, and that's a gospel call itself." Reverend Rosendo
Urrabazo, in the other hand notes "The purpose of COPS is not issues; the
purpose of COPS is leadership formation."
In a Key Note speech "Building a Just Society Through Ethical Leadership,"
in 2001 at the University of Texas,Ernie Cortez, current Southwest Regional
Director of the IAF said,
"That's the role of a broad-based organization, to mentor, to guide, to
teach, to teach people to act on their own interests. That's the work that
COPS is involved in, that's the work that Valley Interfaith is involved
in, that's the work that all the IAF organizations are involved in." He
continues, "It's important for people who don't have any power to learn
that they can get power by organizing, to get power by beginning to
negotiate, to get power by developing broad-based institutions."
In a December 1999 article, Cheryl Dahle, senior writer at Fast Company,
quotes Ernie Cortez, "We organize people not just around issues, but
around their values. The issues fade, and people lose interest in them.
But what they really care about remains: family, dignity, justice, and
hope. We need power to protect what we value."
Cortez, also explains, "The politics that we talk about is the politics of
the Greeks -- the politics of negotiation and deliberation and struggle,
in which people engage in confrontation and compromise. My goal is to
reclaim that political tradition."
The COPS organizational philosophy and strategies may be complex and at
times esoteric in nature, but everyone agrees that their political tactics
have been highly effective in bringing people together to participate in
the American Democratic process.
To understand the magnitude of COPS accomplishments in the last 30 years,
one has to understand the socio-economic and political situation of the
Mexican American community in San Antonio during the 60s and early 70s.
Since the early 50s the GGL,(Good Government League) comprised of wealthy
Anglo ranchers and businessmen from the North Side had almost full control
of electoral politics in San Antonio. The GGL had the wealth, clout and
influence, to arbitrarily select as well as generate the votes to elect
City Councilmen in San Antonio.
Harry Boyte, of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, notes," In the
early seventies, San Antonio still had a "colonial" air where a small
group of businessmen, most of whom belonged to the segregated Texas
Cavalier Country Club, held sway. City council members were elected at
large, which meant that Mexican and African American candidates could
almost never raise funds to compete."
In a 1988 Commonwealth article, Henry Cisneros, who holds masters and
doctoral degrees from Harvard, noted that in the late 60s San Antonio was
"so poor that Peace Corps volunteers were trained in its barrios (West and
South sides) to simulate the conditions they would face in Latin America.
Thousands of Hispanics and black families lived in colonias, with
common-wall, shotgun houses built around public sanitation facilities with
outdoor toilets. The barrios had no sidewalks or paved streets, no
drainage system or flood control. Every spring brought flooding; families
were driven from their homes; children walked to school through mud
sloughs. In the shadow of downtown San Antonio lurked a stateside
third-world 'country'."
At the height of the civil-rights movement," Ernesto Cortes, former Senior
COPS organizer and recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Award wrote, "It was
not unusual to equate the repressive conditions under which the Mexicanos
of South Texas lived to the situation of blacks in the Deep South. Racism
and cultural repression reinforced an economic need to maintain a
reactionary social and political framework for the state."
Fast Forward to 2005, when one sees the level of political diversity, and
ethnic harmony in San Antonio, folks, especially young people, may think
this is the way it has always been. Without COPS intervention back in the
early 70's, it is likely that the GGL or some other similar elitist
organization might still be holding a socio-political, and economic
monopoly in San Antonio. It is also highly likely that the dire economic
and political conditions of the Mexican-American community in San Antonio
might still be the same, or perhaps even worse, today as they were in the
60's.
San Antonio, was virtually turned upside down socially, economically and
politically. COPS indeed revolutionized San Antonio, and did so in a
relatively peaceful, and harmonious fashion. Some of COPS major
accomplishments are the following:
1) "COPS" notes Boyte, "shattered San Antonio's established conservative
order," by helping to transform and reform the city electoral system in
San Antonio. COPS was instrumental in changing the electoral process in
San Antonio from an at-large to a single member district system. This
vital change in the electoral process allowed City candidates to be
elected from single member districts, and provided the opportunity for
Mexican Americans to form a majority in the San Antonio City Council since
1977.
2) COPS managed to generate over one billion dollars in city/county,
state, and federal public funds for capital and infrastructure
improvements for the West and South sides of San Antonio. Along with a
brand new community college in the Southside, COPS was instrumental in
developing a host of projects including street paving, drainage systems,
new housing and housing rehabilitation, public parks, health clinics,
public libraries and other related urban improvements
3) By conducting city-wide voter registration drives, COPS helped elect
Henry Cisneros, who in turn gained national prominence and visibility as
the first Hispanic mayor of a major American city.
4) COPS was instrumental in the establishment of PROJECT QUEST, a
nationally recognized job training and educational program, and a 2003
winner of The Enterprise Foundation and The J.P. Morgan Chase Foundation
Award for Excellence in Workforce Development. PROJECT QUEST was also a
winner of a 1995 Innovations Award from the Ford Foundation and the
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
5) Another one of COPS major achievements was their keen ability and
acumen to hold politicians accountable and honest. For the past 30 years
COPS has been the conscience of the San Antonio, and Bexar County
electoral system. Through their civic vigilance, and rigorous
accountability sessions, COPS has steadfastly worked to keep politicians
honest, fair, and accountable to the voters.
But the work is not done yet. There are still vital economic and
employment issues, and challenges that need be addressed in San Antonio.
In a 1999 Texas Observer editorial Louis Dubose, quotes Ernie Cortez, as
follows,"Among the fifteen largest cities in the country, San Antonio has
the second-highest number of people living below the poverty level. Half
of those living below the poverty level are between the ages of eighteen
and fifty-nine. And most are working: San Antonio's current unemployment
rate is lower than 3.5 percent. Why are people working to remain poor?."
This may be one of the reasons that education and job training have been
central issues for the COPS organization. COPS has been instrumental in
the establishment and development of a host of innovative and progressive
educational and job training programs in San Antonio. According to Louis
Dubose, on a 1999 Texas Observer editorial, COPS has been directly and
indirectly responsible for the establishment of the following programs.
1) A city-wide after-school program that currently serves 34,000
students in San Antonio public schools;
2) An education partnership program that has provided college
scholarships for 4,500 students and reduced the dropout rate;
3) A job-training program that has placed more than 1,000 workers in
jobs that pay an average of $10.16 an hour;
4) A program in the city's Alliance Schools, which provides
after-school programs, curriculum innovations, and counseling for
students and their families.
Perhaps San Antonio should join and rally with COPS to expand these
programs, as well as develop new ones. The future of San Antonio may well
depend on the quantity and quality of these educational and job training
programs and how well these prepare the workforce to meet the challenges
of an ever changing and increasingly complex, technical, and sophisticated
economy.
Margaret Mead once wrote, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that
ever has."
During the last 31 years, COPS/Metro Alliance, has indeed changed and
transformed the world in San Antonio, and continues to work towards
empowering the poor and the voiceless, as well as improving the social,
educational, and economic conditions of all San Antonio citizens.

This piece by Nobel economic laureate Joseph
Stiglitz is a must read. The solutions to this are not simply economic,
but also political. Here's where schools, curriculum, tracking, underfunding, etc. come in, too, though not spelled out herein.

By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZIt’s well known by now that income and wealth inequality in most rich
countries, especially the United States, have soared in recent decades
and, tragically, worsened even more since the Great Recession. But what
about the rest of the world? Is the gap between countries narrowing, as
rising economic powers like China and India have lifted hundreds of
millions of people from poverty? And within poor and middle-income
countries, is inequality getting worse or better? Are we moving toward a
more fair world, or a more unjust one?
These are complex questions, and new research by a World Bank
economist named Branko Milanovic, along with other scholars, points the
way to some answers.
Starting in the 18th century, the industrial revolution produced
giant wealth for Europe and North America. Of course, inequality within
these countries was appalling — think of the textile mills of Liverpool
and Manchester, England, in the 1820s, and the tenements of the Lower
East Side of Manhattan and the South Side of Chicago in the 1890s — but
the gap between the rich and the rest, as a global phenomenon, widened
even more, right up through about World War II. To this day, inequality
between countries is far greater than inequality within countries.

Women’s socioeconomic and political progress advanced dramatically across the globe in the last half of the twentieth century, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean. Yet gender disparities remain high, and bridging those gaps has been a slow process. This is partly explained by negative stereotypes and misguided perceptions of gender roles—both still prevalent in Latin America. Such stereotypes not only distort many social interactions at home and in the workplace; they act as disincentives for girls to apply themselves in advanced study—particularly in mathematics.
Just as significantly, they affect the overall labor supply. In both formal and informal labor markets, where Latin American families get 80 percent of their total income, gender gaps remain. Although the level of women’s participation in the workforce has markedly increased over the past two decades across the region, three out of every five workers are male.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, the proportion of working-age women in the labor market has increased from one-half to two-thirds, with married and cohabiting women leading the charge. Many of those women married more educated husbands or were unburdened by dependents such as children or elderly relatives.
The gender inequalities extend to salaries. In my recently published book, New Century, Old Disparities: Ethnic Earnings Gaps in Latin America and the Caribbean, we document that—based on representative data from 18 countries in the region circa 2007—males earn from 29 to 31 percent more than females with the same age, level of education, number of children, presence of other income earner at home, type of employment, and average hours worked per week.
This has improved only marginally from two decades ago, when the same metric was from 33 to 35 percent.

Facing the Glass Ceiling

Female underpayment in the labor market is more pronounced among informal workers, the self-employed, workers in small firms of five employees or fewer, and part-time employees working at most 30 hours per week.
Females dominate the part-time economy. It is a convenient way for them to both enter the workforce and design flexible hours around household responsibilities. One in four female workers is a part-time employee, compared to only one in 10 male workers. Examples of popular flexible-hour professions include domestic workers and pre-school teachers. But the flexibility for females comes at a cost—reflected in the earnings penalties they absorb.
Women work more hours than men overall, but they are not fully compensated for those hours. Recent data from official national household surveys in Colombia reveal that in a typical week, working men and women devote an average of 48 and 40 hours, respectively, to paid work and 13 and 32 hours, respectively, to unpaid work such as household responsibilities.
There are perceptions about gender roles that limit women’s bargaining possibilities in the search for a fairer split of chores within their households. The 2009 Latinobarómetro survey, administered across 18 countries in Latin America, reports that one-third of respondents agree with the statement, “It is better to have women at home and men at work.”
Thus, in the limited scope for such a fairer split of responsibilities, women often resort to more flexible segments of the labor markets. Doing so limits their access to top-paying occupations in the long term, illustrating a glass ceiling that hinders—or even blocks—their movement up the corporate ladder.

Household surveys from eight Latin American countries show that, out of 10 top-paying occupations, including CEO, architect, lawyer, doctor, physicist, and production manager, women hold a smaller share of these lucrative posts compared to men. Indeed, the gender-based earnings gaps among these high-paying occupations are more pronounced than in the rest of the labor market. That is, flexible and top-paying occupations show higher gender earnings gaps than the rest of the labor markets. [See Figure 1] Many of these high-paying positions rely heavily on quantitative skills—an area in which males of the region still have more training, despite the gains that females have made in terms of general schooling.

Women in Education

Gender disparities in the workforce are perplexing—particularly in light of evidence that suggests females across Latin America and the Caribbean are actually outpacing males in educational attainment.
Our research team at the Inter-American Development Bank has found, for example, that females born by 1980 attended, on average, one more quarter of a school year than males (9.5 versus 9.2). In contrast, males born by 1940 achieved, on average, one extra year of schooling over females (6 versus 5).1 This gender educational attainment gap reversed from being male-dominated to female-dominated on a regional level beginning with the cohort born in 1968.
The higher schooling attainment of women is clearly seen among the highest educated. While by 1992, 16 percent of working females and 11 percent of working males in Latin America either partially or fully completed tertiary education, by 2007 those distributions were 26 percent and 17 percent, respectively. Moreover, the global phenomenon of higher schooling achievement among females began earlier in Latin America than in the rest of the developing world.
The only countries in the region where boys still attain more schooling than girls are Bolivia and Guatemala—two countries with sizable Indigenous populations—which suggests important links to ethnicity, culture and gender parity.
Yet despite the fact that females are staying in school longer, their test scores in math still fall short of males’.
Consider data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)-administered Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The 2009 PISA was applied to more than 475,000 students in 65 countries, with 97,000 of them from nine Latin American and Caribbean countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, and Uruguay. Boys outperformed girls in the quantitative section of the test in 35 out of 65 countries—including in seven out of the nine Latin American nations. Only in Trinidad and Tobago did girls outperform boys. In Panama, the gender differences in quantitative performance were statistically insignificant.
Girls still score lower than boys globally in the PISA, but the gap is magnified in Latin America, even more so among the highest performers.
About one-third of the world’s top 1 percent of PISA test-takers are girls: 1,700 students in total. Of this population, however, only two students are from Latin America, despite the fact that about one-fifth of all female PISA test-takers—more than 50,000 students—hail from the region. [See Figure 2]
Compare gender disparity in top performance across world regions. In East Asia and the Pacific, for instance, 42 percent of top performers are girls and 58 percent are boys—compared to 13 percent and 87 percent, respectively, in the Latin American sample. Indeed, Latin America and the Caribbean has the single lowest share of any global region in terms of the top female PISA math scorers.

This lower mathematics performance also induces gender differences in fields of educational specialization. UNESCO data indicate that by 2008, females across six countries in South America—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Uruguay—constituted almost 60 percent of all graduates from college programs. Yet they represented only 30 percent of those studying engineering, manufacturing or construction. Women, however, made up a majority of graduates in the fields of education (73 percent), health care and sociology (71 percent).
It’s not a question of global gender inequity. Half of the countries that participated in the 2009 PISA had equal levels of gender attainment. But what do those countries have in common insofar as educational outperformance of Latin America? What makes one country more prone to gender parity in students’ mathematics performance?

Underlying Social Elements

Using data developed by the World Economic Forum and the World Values Survey, Paola Sapienza of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and her co-authors argued in Science in 2008 that countries with greater gender parity in economic and political opportunities tend to show lower or no gender gaps in math performance.2 The findings lend support to the idea that the current status of adult women shapes expectations for girls and influences and the way girls and boys decide how to apply themselves in their studies, in this case in math. Here, negative stereotypes about gender roles play a role in inducing males and females to pursue certain paths of study.
The idea that math- and science-related work is better suited for boys is rooted in many societies, both in the developed and the developing world. Dario Cvencek and his co-authors from the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences provide recent evidence from the United States in a study published in 2011 in Child Development. They found that in a sample of Seattle schoolchildren, primary-school students implicitly and explicitly tended to associate math more with boys than with girls as early as the second grade.
In Cvencek’s research, his team provided students with names of boys and girls as well as with mathematics- and reading-related words (e.g., addition, numbers, graph, books, story, and letter) on a computer screen. In a first set of exercises, students explicitly tended to associate boys’ names with mathematics terms and girls’ names with reading words. In a second set of exercises, researchers provided not only the names and words but also the associations (e.g., Jacob-graph; Joshua-letter; Emily-addition; and Jessica-book). Here, students took longer to react to a female-mathematics association than to any other, revealing a stronger implicit association between gender and field.3
Such perceptions are nurtured by cultural and commercial stereotypes that can have an impact from an early age. Take the “Teen Talk Barbie” doll from the 1990s, which spoke phrases such as, “Math class is tough.” At local toy stores, science- and math-oriented toys are hardly conducive to gender neutrality with respect to their shapes and colors. However, popular culture has begun to address these vestiges of sexism. One example is the famous 2006 episode of The Simpsons titled “Girls Just Want to Have Sums.” These are good signs, but there is still work to do.
Juan Camilo Cárdenas at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá and his colleagues from Stockholm provide the most recent evidence of changing attitudes.4 They tested gender differences in competitive settings in 2011, comparing children from Colombia and Sweden—two countries that substantially differ in terms of gender parity. They measured performance for kids aged nine through 12 on four tasks linked to different degrees of gender stereotyping: mathematics, running, word search, and skipping rope. Their study design allowed them to measure competitiveness and risk-taking for performing the tasks. It provided encouraging signs: boys and girls performed equally in mathematics, word search and running in both countries. The dramatic gender gap: boys’ tendency to take risks was significantly higher than that of girls in both countries, but the disparity was even more pronounced in Colombia than in Sweden.
The embedded stereotypes sometimes appear in a seemingly inadvertent or unconscious way. A 2005 study I conducted with Martin Benavides at the Peruvian think-tank Grupo de Análisis para el Desarrollo (Group for the Analysis of Development—GRADE) analyzed the images contained in Peru’s official school textbooks for the fourth, fifth and sixth grades. In the textbook pictures, males outnumbered females two to one. Moreover, males were more likely to be depicted in school and work environments, while the images of females showed them performing household and leisure activities.
Similarly, with colleagues at the Universidad de Los Andes, I analyzed photos of people published in nationally circulated Colombian newspapers and magazines during the second quarter of 2011. At first glance, the gender split seemed unbiased: one-third of the images contained only men, another third only women, and another third both.
However, the context in which they appeared was wildly imbalanced. Women were usually depicted in situations related to health, friendship, love, and beauty; men were pictured in environments denoting entrepreneurship, security and justice. The business publication used in the sample depicted less than one-fifth of women-only images, with only half of those in an environment denoting entrepreneurship, security or justice.
Peeling back the onion of gender disparities in Latin American and Caribbean labor markets reveals gender stereotypes as discomfiting sources of bias, rooted as early as primary school—or before that, at home or in the public sphere.
The effects are tremendous: fewer women pursue an educational path suited to quantitative acumen—skills that pay well professionally—and thus hold fewer positions of leadership. In this regard, regional economies inadvertently limit their development opportunities as they fail to take advantage of the full potential of half of their populations.
Crafting economic policy with gender parity foresight is smart economics.
What can be done? For one, investment in early childhood development is strongly recommended. That is, teaching children before they enter school that “mathematics is for me” and “yes, I can.” Training teachers to eradicate stereotypes works—but only to a fault. It is equally important, if not more, that children learn about gender parity from their parents and support structures at home.
Addressing gender inequality is essential to tackling longstanding—if inadvertent—stereotypes. Expectations of female achievement must be reshaped, because the continuation of an unacceptable status quo will prevent women from realizing their true potential in the workforce.